Ernesto P. Uruchurtu (28 February 1906 – 8 October 1997) was a Mexican politician affiliated with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and its forerunners. A native of the state of Sonora, he held positions in the judiciary and within his party before serving two short stints as secretary of the interior and a 14-year term as the head of government of the Federal District.
Serving as the capital's unelected chief executive under three successive presidents, he strove both to modernise and beautify the city and to clean up its morals, with his style of government earning him the sobriquet ("The Iron Regent"). His downfall came in 1966 under President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, after which he never again held public office.
Early years: schooling and Sonora Ernesto Uruchurtu Peralta was born in Hermosillo, Sonora, on 28 February 1906, the fifth of nine children born to Gustavo Adolfo Uruchurtu Ramírez and María Luisa Regina Peralta Arvizu. He attended school at the Colegio de Sonora and the Escuela Normal de Hermosillo. He then went on to study law at the National University of Mexico (UNM, later UNAM) in Mexico City, where his law-school classmates included Antonio Ortiz Mena, Antonio Carrillo Flores and, most notably, Miguel Alemán Valdés. He received his degree after successfully defending his thesis, titled Escuelas y tendencias penales. El nuevo Código Penal ("Schools and Criminal Trends. The New Criminal Code"), in 1930.
After completing his studies, Uruchurtu took a position as a first-instance judge in the border city of Nogales, Sonora. In 1931, Governor of Sonora nominated him to serve as the state's attorney-general; the Congress of Sonora unanimously approved the appointment, and he took office on 19 February 1932. During his tenure, he chaired a committee charged with harmonising the state's laws with the federal constitution and secondary legislation before resigning on 11 November 1932. He spent the following years in private legal practice before being appointed as a notary public in Ciudad Obregón, Sonora, on 6 March 1935. He also began writing political opinion pieces for El Pueblo, a local newspaper owned by , with whom he maintained a years-long correspondence.
In 1936, Emilio Portes Gil, then president of the National Revolutionary Party (PNR, which would later become the Institutional Revolutionary Party), selected Uruchurtu as the party's general secretary in Sonora; he assumed the position on 1 July but did not survive much after Portes Gil's resignation as party president in August 1936. Still within the party, he backed bid to represent the PNR in that year's gubernatorial election. Yocupicio won the party primaries and went on to win the 11 November election; upon taking office as governor, he nominated Uruchurtu for a seat on the state's Supreme Court of Justice. Uruchurtu was sworn in on 2 January 1937 but, after clashing with Yocupicio, resigned on 11 May 1937.
Return to Mexico City: national politics Following his break with the governor, Uruchurtu returned to Mexico City, from where he continued to criticise Yocupicio's administration until the end of his term. However, when , Yocupicio's preferred candidate to succeed him, won the 1939 gubernatorial election, Uruchurtu turned his attention away from Sonoran politics and towards the national stage and, most particularly, the 1940 presidential election. Unimpressed by the official candidate, Manuel Ávila Camacho, who was expected to continue the left-leaning policies of outgoing president Lázaro Cárdenas, Uruchurtu threw his support behind the conservative Juan Andreu Almazán and his Revolutionary Party of National Unification (PRUN). The election was nasty, violent, almost certainly fraudulent, and ultimately won by Ávila Camacho with an official total of 94% of the votes cast. In the aftermath, Almazán temporarily fled the country and, by 1942, Uruchurtu had realigned himself with the ruling party (now renamed the Party of the Mexican Revolution, PRM) and had taken a position as legal director of the (BNCE), a state-owned rural development bank. At the same time he began supporting his elder brother bid to be chosen as the PRM's candidate in the 1943 Sonora gubernatorial election, but Gustavo withdrew when former president Abelardo L. Rodríguez decided to contend.
In May 1945, Uruchurtu resigned his position with the BNCE and joined Miguel Alemán Valdés's campaign for the 1946 presidential election. Alemán Valdés, whose friendship with Uruchurtu dated back to their time together at the National University, was then serving as Ávila Camacho's secretary of the interior, a position traditionally seen as the antechamber of the presidency. During the campaign, Uruchurtu was appointed general secretary of the newly renamed Institutional Revolutionary Party on 19 January 1946.
Miguel Alemán won the 7 July 1946 election with almost 78% of the votes cast. In assembling his cabinet, he appointed former governor of Campeche to the choice position of interior secretary, with Uruchurtu assigned to an undersecretarial position in the same department. As undersecretary he oversaw a range of issues, including immigration policy and relations with the country's governors, and played a role in Alemán's planned political and judicial reforms. When Pérez Martínez died unexpectedly on 12 February 1948, Alemán selected Uruchurtu to replace him on an interim basis, until the appointment of Pérez's formal replacement, Governor of Veracruz Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, on 30 June 1948. Back in his role as undersecretary, one of the main tasks Uruchurtu oversaw was the updating of the 1930 Criminal Code on which he had written his undergraduate thesis; a draft was finalised in 1949 but the new code was never enacted.
On 13 October 1951, Ruiz Cortines was announced as the PRI's candidate for the 1952 presidential election and, that same day, President Alemán appointed Uruchurtu secretary of the interior, a position in which he remained until the end of Alemán's term on 30 November 1952. During his 14 months as interior secretary, Uruchurtu oversaw the enactment of a new Federal Electoral Law that facilitated, to some extent, the registration of opposition political parties.
Ruiz Cortines won the 7 July 1952 election with 74% of the vote and took office on 1 December.
Head of the Federal District Department For much of the 20th century, governance of Mexico City, as the seat of the federal government, was the responsibility of the (DDF). The DDF was led by an unelected cabinet-level official appointed directly by the President of the Republic, and those presidential appointees were commonly known as ("regents"). It was not until 1997 that the regent's successor position was directly elected by the city's inhabitants.
President Ruiz Cortines took his oath of office at the Palacio de Bellas Artes on 1 December 1952, flanked by the members of his cabinet, including Ernesto P. Uruchurtu as head of the Department of the Federal District. He would remain in that position for an uninterrupted and unequalled 13 years, 10 months and 14 days, serving under Ruiz Cortines and his two successors, Adolfo López Mateos and Gustavo Díaz Ordaz. His authoritarian style in discharging his duties, his intolerance of corrupution and his efforts to stamp out what he deemed "immoral" activities in pursuit of the capital's modernisation soon earned him the Regente de Hierro nickname.
Uruchurtu's administrations coincided almost exactly with the period known as the "Mexican Miracle", during which, thanks to the economic policy of "stabilising development" () through import substitution industrialisation, the country enjoyed sustained economic growth of 6.6% a year, inflation was kept under control and, after a 1954 devaluation, the peso remained stable against the U.S. dollar. Industrialisation brought with it urbanisation: with some 3 million inhabitants, Mexico City ranked 17th among the world's largest cities in 1950; by 1960 it had risen to 13th place, with a population of 4.8 million, and by 1970, it was the world's fourth largest city, home to some 8.8 million people. It fell to successive presidents to manage the country's booming economic growth, and to the head of the Federal District Department to manage its burgeoning capital.
Public works
Uruchurtu's time in office was noted for its major restructuring of the city's infrastructure. Among the most significant projects were the culverting of the Río de la Piedad and the construction of the Viaducto de la Piedad, which was later extended as the Viaducto Miguel Alemán; Río Churubusco was also culverted and the avenue of the same name built and widened. The first section of the Anillo Periférico ring road was built from the Toreo de Cuatro Caminos on the limits between Miguel Hidalgo and Naucalpan to Cuemanco in Xochimilco. Paseo de la Reforma was widened; although this required the demolition of several blocks in the city centre, the benefits for the growing volume of urban traffic were significant. Similarly, Avenida Insurgentes Norte was extended from the city centre to Indios Verdes and towards the highway to Pachuca, Hidalgo. Later works included the completion of the Viaducto Miguel Alemán, the conversion of the Calzada de Tlalpan into an expressway, the northern extension of Paseo de la Reforma and the start of work on the Estadio Azteca.
By the end of 1954, through investments in pumping and drainage systems and by reducing the volume of water extracted from its aquifers, the city's age-old problem with seasonal flooding had been resolved. A ten-year plan was drawn up to address the different aspects of the city's water problem: drainage, supply, treatment and subsidence. Three wastewater treatment plants were built; the Interceptor Poniente, a 17-km storm drain, was laid down through the city's subsoil; and ban was placed on drilling new wells in urban areas to reduce chronic levels of subsidence.
During his nearly 14 years in office, the city acquired almost 200 new schools. More than 180 public markets were built, including La Merced, San Juan and Sonora. Clandestine and unsanitary slaughterhouses were replaced in 1955 by the Ferrería Abattoir in Azcapotzalco. As part of his drive to promote formal markets, he also clamped down – hard – on street trading.
Public spaces established during the period include the second section of Chapultepec Park, with two large artificial lakes, an amusement park, fountains and gardens, and the . The was also built, housing the city's second zoo, as well as extensive sports facilities and landscaped and wooded areas. The Magdalena Mixhuca Sports City, a monumental project for the practice of a wide range of sports, was inaugurated in 1958. The canals of Xochimilco were restored and the embarcadero and neighbouring Xochimilco Flower Market were built. In 1957, Uruchurtu and Ruiz Cortines inaugurated the , covering 95,000 m2 in Benito Juárez. In addition to creating new public spaces, he also oversaw the rehabilitation of existing ones, including the Alameda Central, and renovated many of the city's broken fountains.
His administrations also saw the construction of major museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art and, in coordination with the Secretariat of Public Education, the National Museum of Anthropology (both opened in 1964). Next to Chapultepec Castle, the Museum of Mexican History (, opened 1960) was built, and in the city centre various colonial buildings were restored, notably the one that now houses the Museum of Mexico City.